Singapore Wires Its Hopes to Net With Ambitious Schools Program

The Internet is everywhere in Singapore--on billboards, television, in the newspapers, in the mouths and minds of government officials and businesspeople, even in ads on taxis and buses. This country is betting its future on the Internet. Its ambitious plans, and its formidable capabilities, are likely to soon make it the world’s most wired nation. Indeed, Singapore is poised to become the world’s first true “digital nation.”

How Singapore will both retain its character and embrace the Internet will be a fascinating story, one loaded with implications for Asia and the rest of the world.

Singapore, at the end of the 20th century, is the last remaining example of an ancient political form, the city-state. Famous for its remarkable cleanliness, orderliness and polite and gracious citizens, it is an island slightly smaller physically than the San Francisco Bay Area, with a population approaching 4 million.

Despite this small size, it’s an economic powerhouse in Asia. Even in the midst of the region’s worst economic crisis since World War II, the World Economic Forum in Switzerland ranks Singapore as the world’s most competitive economy. The country experienced a decade of explosive growth, as much as 8% per year, as one of the “Asian tigers.” The current economic crisis has slowed its growth to a flat rate today, but Singapore has escaped the catastrophic economic collapse of its neighbors, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Government officials are predicting a return to 4% annual growth within five years, largely led by computers and Internet-related businesses, especially e-commerce. In fact, computer and Internet companies here are the only ones showing a profit these days.

Unlike its neighbors, Singapore has no natural resources to exploit, no room for large concentrations of manufacturing and no large reservoir of low-wage workers. Leaders therefore see the Internet as the country’s primary economic opportunity.

Education is thus a high priority, and Singapore is going all out to wire its schools, train its teachers and introduce its young people to cyberspace.

I came to Singapore earlier this month as a guest of the Ministry of Education to participate in and speak at the ministry’s conference on education and information technology, EdTech ’99. The conference brought together about 3,000 Singapore teachers, school principals, government authorities and technology vendors for discussions and workshops on Singapore’s educational technology master plan.

The goals of this plan are quite ambitious. The Minister of Education, Teo Chee Hean, announced that by 2003, Singapore schools will have a student-computer ratio of 2 to 1, all 24,000 teachers will have received computer training, and 30% of school instruction will depend on computers and the Internet. The schools will all be networked.

Another American speaker at the conference, David Jonassen of Pennsylvania State University, called the Singapore plan “the most ambitious and far-reaching in the world.” All my U.S. colleagues agreed that Singapore is in many ways far ahead of the U.S. in computer-based education.

Students graduating from the Singapore school system will enter an economy that is being rapidly transformed by information technologies. Just as in education, the government is throwing money at new technologies for the country’s infrastructure and economy. A story this month in the Straits Times, the leading English-language newspaper here, reported that soon all Singapore citizens will have “Internet identity cards,” smart cards that will authorize Internet accounts and be used for Internet banking, e-mail and accessing government services and benefits.

The government is also busy building Singapore One (https://s-one.net.sg) described as “the world’s first nationwide implementation of a multimedia broad-band network,” using wireless, cable and digital subscriber line connections throughout the country, reaching every home and flat in Singapore.

Finally, to complete its vision of Singapore as the “Intelligent Island,” the National Computer Board is strongly pushing electronic commerce for future prosperity. The country’s plan for e-commerce, announced in September, is for 50% of all Singapore business to be online, with $4 billion in annual revenue, by 2003.

Singapore officials see the future of their country as an international “data port,” the cyberspace equivalent of their actual harbor, the second-busiest port in the world after Hong Kong. Singapore hopes to be not only the site of most e-commerce operations in Asia but also the host of the collateral businesses such as shipping, financial clearing, computer security and the legal work of electronic contracts and deals.

The Internet is tightly controlled here--the city’s three Internet service providers all filter network content, as instructed by the government, and the schools get even further filtered material. The government has leveled heavy fines against people who have accessed pornography, and authorities have even inspected the files of businesses, looking for illegal material. Free speech is also curtailed, although political criticism is beginning to appear in newspapers.

The paternalism of the government has also taken its toll on the initiative of citizens. A recent editorial in the Straits Times noted that the best and brightest students here typically opt for secure and prestigious jobs in the civil service instead of taking risks in the private sector. The government is promoting the concept of the “technopreneur,” a role largely alien to Asian society, particularly because it entails an acceptance of failure.

Visitors to Singapore are often overwhelmed by the city’s beauty, its nearly unbelievable efficiency, its pristine, garden-like landscape and its spectacular wealth. It’s probably the most modern and sophisticated city in the world. But it lacks the edginess and restlessness we often take for granted in the West, especially in the United States. Singaporeans are aware of this--they seem to be aware of nearly everything. They are now being encouraged to “loosen up,” visit other countries, depend less on the government and take more risks.

They will have a balancing act of great difficulty: to embrace the world through the Internet while preserving what has made their city one of the great urban areas of the world.

It occurred to me, as I listened to my hosts and the various people I spoke with here, that I was glimpsing the 21st century’s version of what must have occurred in Venice at the beginning of the Renaissance--a contemporary version of the decisions in that older city-state that helped Venice dominate its corner of the world for the next 300 years.

Singapore seems poised to play the same role by gambling its future on the Internet. The young director of e-commerce for the National Computer Board, Liang Moung, told me, “We think it’s a safe bet.”

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Gary Chapman is director of the 21st Century Project at the University of Texas at Austin. His e-mail address is gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu.